having, however, in common a sort of social shabbiness; and he
introduced them to the rather cold and blank little studio which he had
lent to a comrade for the term of his elegant absence. The comrade was
another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to
await them "regardless," and this reckless repast, and the second
ingenuous compatriot, and the faraway makeshift life, with its jokes
and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four chairs, its
overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of nearly all else--these
things wove round the occasion a spell to which our hero unreservedly
surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriots--for two or three others soon
gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free
discriminations--involving references indeed, involving enthusiasms and
execrations that made him, as they said, sit up; he liked above all the
legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised
to the romantic, that he soon read into the scene. The ingenuous
compatriots showed a candour, he thought, surpassing even the candour
of Woollett; they were red-haired and long-legged, they were quaint and
queer and dear and droll; they made the place resound with the
vernacular, which he had never known so marked as when figuring for the
chosen language, he must suppose, of contemporary art. They twanged
with a vengeance the aesthetic lyre--they drew from it wonderful airs.
This aspect of their life had an admirable innocence; and he looked on
occasion at Maria Gostrey to see to what extent that element reached
her. She gave him however for the hour, as she had given him the
previous day, no further sign than to show how she dealt with boys;
meeting them with the air of old Parisian practice that she had for
every one, for everything, in turn. Wonderful about the delicate daubs,
masterful about the way to make tea, trustful about the legs of chairs
and familiarly reminiscent of those, in the other time, the named, the
numbered or the caricatured, who had flourished or failed, disappeared
or arrived, she had accepted with the best grace her second course of
little Bilham, and had said to Strether, the previous afternoon on his
leaving them, that, since her impression was to be renewed, she would
reserve judgement till after the new evidence.

The new evidence was to come, as it proved, in a day or two. He soon
had from Maria a message to the effect that an excellent bo